Tuesday, 25 November 2014

My Great-Grandfather and the Peaky Blinders

At the age of six I expressed a desire to learn to play the
piano and my parents were unsure where this aspiration had come from since most
of my family were musically illiterate and they had no interest whatsoever in
playing a musical instrument. Four years and many piano lessons later, I
overhead my father mention in conversation with a neighbour that my
great-grandfather James Aloysious Ingram (known as Curly) was very musical
and he played the piano and the mandolin. My father mused that perhaps I had
picked up an idle musical gene from James and he recalled how his sister/my
aunt would often sit on James’ lap and put her tiny hands over his large hands
while he played the piano. Apparently she would remark on how rough his hands
were and how his knuckles were beaten up from the fights. I thought that was an
odd thing to say, ‘from the fights’.

My father showed me a photograph of my
great-grandfather in his later years and I was surprised to see that James was the absolute spitting
image of my father and, in turn, of me.

I felt a close connection with James and pestered my father
to tell me more about James’s life. And the more that I discovered about him,
the more I found him to be a fascinating individual. James lived in Harborne,
he was ex-army and a bare knuckle fighter at Smethwick market. Every
Sunday morning he would walk from Harborne to Smethwick to fight and when he
returned home he would give his wife Florie all the silver from the win money
that he had earned and he kept the copper for himself as beer money. He seemed
to make a fair living out of it. James and his family were well looked after
because they were in with the right crowd and knew the right people, although
the company that James kept seemed very dubious indeed. A number of shady
characters cropped up at various points in my father’s stories, such as the
mysterious Italian Mr Mansini who found my grandfather a job when he came out
of the army. Mr Mansini sent my grandfather to the local factory with a note simply
saying that he had been sent by Mr Mansini - the note alone was a guarantee of
a job and the gesture was made because my grandfather was Curly’s son and
‘Curly and his family were to be well looked after’.

But the
most memorable – and disturbing - thing that my father told me about James was
this; if he went to the pub or out for the day with his family then he
would wear his ‘home cap’, but if he went out of the house wearing his ‘working
cap’ then my great-grandmother would stay awake and wait up all night in the front
bay window of the house until he came home, because if James went out wearing his ‘working
cap’ then she knew there was going to be trouble. When I asked about the
significance of the caps, my father explained that the ‘working cap’ had razor
blades sewn in the rim which came in handy if there was ever a fight. And, by the
sounds of it, there were lots of fights. He said, for instance, that James
played the mandolin in the Green Man pub in Harborne and one evening there was
a huge fight between his group of friends and the police. It seemed to have
been some kind of sting operation targeting them all. James took out three
policemen, he smashed his mandolin over the head of one policeman (thereby
ending his musical career) and he threw another policeman through the front
window of the pub into the horse road outside. The police took James to Steel
House Lane police station where he 'fell down the steps of the police station' (he
was beaten up) and my great-grandmother claimed that he was never the same
again afterwards.

I remember this conversation well because I was not only
shocked by the thought of slashing someone's face with razor blades, but also by the way in which my
father spoke so matter-of-factly about it all and with such an oddly warm affection
towards the individuals in the stories. I had heard both my father and my grandfather
mention the words ‘peaky blinder’ before and I didn’t know, or much care at the
time, who they were referring to. But now it all made sense. It was somehow
acceptable for my father and grandfather to speak kindly about James and his
friends because these individuals had ‘principals’ - they had a strong
family-like bond, they would watch out for one another and their
families and they were firmly ‘on our side’. I took comfort in knowing
that, due to my surname, I would have nothing to fear had I encountered one of
these suspicious characters on the street.

On the flip side of my family coin there is my
great-grandfather on my mother’s side: Sam Richards. Sam’s portrait hung on the
wall in my grandparents’ front room for many years and he was gentle-looking man
wearing a sharp business suit, well slicked hair and a kindly smile. Sam
started out as a boxer, then he became a book maker and eventually the owner of
a large boxing ring in Selly Oak.Although he was neck-deep in dodgy book-making dealings, he presented a
business-like front to his activities and he clearly had the police under his
influence. The police would tip him off before a raid and when
passing on their regular beat they would bang on the wall of the house whenever
he needed to clear the house (which most often involved sending my grandmother
down to the bottom of the garden with the betting slips in her dolls pram). Sam
made a great deal of money, he bought a lot of local property, he was a
freemason and he contributed to the community by buying shoes for local
orphans. He certainly didn’t hide the fact that his business was lucrative and
he once caused a stir in the community by buying my grandmother a silver-handled
umbrella (which she subsequently left on a bus).

My mother recalls that the words ‘peaky blinders’ were
banded around the household when she was a child and she was aware that Sam
mixed equally with both well-heeled individuals and shady groups who looked out
for his business. I had the feeling that the Curly’s of the world were on Sam’s
payroll rather than his drinking buddy in the pub - in fact it is a running
family joke that my father’s family were on the rough-and-ready side of the
Birmingham gangs, whereas my mother’s family were much more discreet with their
dealings and ‘higher up the food chain’.

Sam Richards (centre)

I vividly remember the stories that my grandparents told me about growing up in Birmingham and I have portraits and photographs of James and Sam and assorted
paraphernalia from their lives. I remember visiting my great-aunt who lived to
be over one-hundred years old and seeing how she kept their old terraced house perfectly-preserved,
with a rocking chair in front of an open fire, lace antimacassarson the armchairs and a freezing cold
outside toilet. And, aside from modernising our
houses, things haven’t changed a great deal in some areas of Birmingham. I grew
up in an area of Birmingham that could be a violent place to live but it also
valued strong generational links forged between large, influential families
that looked out for each other. Loyalty and family names still carry a great
deal of weight around here. And seeing how closely I physically resemble James
and hearing how similar our characters are (even down to our piano playing),
things haven’t really changed that much within my own family either.

So, as you may well imagine, when I heard twenty-years later
that a TV series had been made that focused on the Blinders, I was filled with
mixed emotions and expectations because I felt as though someone was making a
documentary about a close friend or relative. A writer who was unfamiliar with
the true spirit of these individuals could be tempted to ridicule the Blinders or
cast them as heartless gangsters. However I wasn’t disappointed. In fact a
great deal of content made me smile because it cut very close to home. Pretty
bang-on in some cases. I’m pleased that the series didn't shy away from the
brutal, frenetic violence that these men were predisposed to because that was
certainly the case from the stories that I heard (and I still see it around me
in some districts of Birmingham these days) but it also highlighted the strong
allegiances, friendships and family ties between the gang members. The only
thing I found lacking was the vicious humour that these men had - the constant
joking around and the casual way that serious matters, such as injury,
incarceration or even death, were laughed about and passed over. I saw this raw humour
in my grandfather’s friends and older family members who have now passed away
and I found it amusing but deeply unsettling. For this reason the
character of Arthur is the most authentic by far, if only for the speed in
which he switches between loud light-hearted banter and intensely serious vicious attack.

But the greatest accomplishment of Peaky Blinders is that it
portrays the central characters as both hero and villain thereby giving the
viewer the uneasy experience of both fearing and admiring them, which was the
exact same uncomfortable feeling that I grappled with upon learning about my
family connections with the Blinders as a child. James’ working cap gave me
more than a few nightmares as a child, but there are aspects of his personality
and values that I admire and see within myself. Perhaps the fondness that
I have for James, Sam and their friends is borne out of a realisation that
although they were violent men who sailed on the wrong side of the law, they
also had strong family values, they were loyal to those who were loyal to them
and they would protect their friends and loved ones at all costs – all values
that modern-day society would do well to aspire to.

(Interestingly, my auntie tells me that James’ death was
quite a talking point. The story goes that a gypsy came into the Green Man pub in
Harbourne and started reading palms. James paid her to read his palm, she took
one look at his hand and refused, then left the pub straight away.James died only days afterwards).